Rooting for new meaning

Deepa Bharath

Learning about the capricious ways of the English language can be

fascinating and frustrating at the same time.

Students in Jaymi Ropp’s fourth-grade language arts class at Davis

Elementary School in Costa Mesa learned all about discovering the

intricacies of root words and phonetics Monday morning.

Ropp wrote down four words on the board: spectrum, spectacle,

inspect and spectator.

It didn’t take the students long to figure out the common part to

all four words -- “spect.” Easy enough.

“What are these words called?” Ropp asked.

She gave them a hint to make it a little easier.

“It grows at the bottom of a tree trunk,” she said with a smile.

A bevy of hands went up in the air.

“Root words,” student Autumn Robinson said.

Then Ropp wrote four more words: resign, signal and signature.

They spotted the root word, “sign,” and said the words aloud.

“How many thought the word signal should be pronounced like

‘sinal’?” she asked.

A couple of hands went up.

“Yeah, it’s tricky,” the teacher said. “The word sign is

pronounced like sine, but the word signal is pronounced differently.”

Ropp repeated the word with an emphasis on the “g.”

She then handed out sheets of paper with words containing “sign”

or “spect” in them and asked students to underline or circle when

they saw either of those.

The different exercises help students to understand the words,

their meanings and pronunciation, Ropp said after class.

“The tricky part about the English language is that there are so

many exceptions to the rule,” she said. “It takes a lot of repetition

and exposure to words to understand them better.”

Most of the students in the class speak another language,

primarily Spanish, at home, Ropp said.

“So it’s important to increase their exposure to words and their

roots to give them a better understanding of the language,” she said.

“It also helps improve their conversational skills.”

The challenge to the teacher is finding different ways to present

the material, Ropp said.

“Just explaining isn’t going to cut it,” she said. “We use

pictures, sometimes bodily actions, and just find many different ways

of attacking a word.”